Artist of the Week

Artist: Georgina Wilcox​Art form: Art

What do you do?​I’m a visual artist originating from and currently living in London. I’ve worked across mediums including mixed media painting, textiles, film and installation, and now I mostly illustrate.

I think my practice at it’s core is very idea-focused, and the medium tends to follow. Recounting, recalling and reinventing memory drives my work. I’m almost obsessive in analysing, at times becoming romanticised with the past; I find it madly difficult to let go. My university tutor once referred to my thought-process as being ‘grasshopper-like’ and I think that’s always bemused me.

Where have you studied?I completed my BA Hons Fine Art in 2015 at the University Of Kent (School of Music &Fine Art) in Chatham, Medway. In hindsight, those three years were entirely a grapple with my identity in it’s artistic sense and I’ll be the first to admit that I was really disengaged with what I was making for probably the first 2 and a half years. I think it’s really easy to become frantic about what you’re outputting when deadlines are enforced upon your creativity. I lived in a flat of 8 in my final year, all studying Fine Art or Music Technology, and I look back at that time fondly. A few of us (myself included) rarely slept and it was a realhotbed for lucid conversation and ideas.

​What motivates you?Motivation ebbs and flows, I’ve learnt to accept that and almost capitalize upon it. In terms of illustrating and design, off-the- wall briefs excite me. My personal practice is largely emotionally driven. Sometimes you’ve just got to have a good cry into your sketchbook, you know?

During my last two years of university and shortly after I graduated I worked as a gallery assistant at Beaconsfield Contemporary Art in Vauxhall, and it exposed me to the curatorial element of art practice. I really value the people and artists I met there. John Timberlake showed his exhibition ‘We Are History’ (2014) whilst I worked there and he was making these subtle connections within histories and narratives and between truth and fiction, which has always resonated with me.

Please tell us a bit about your example piece of work‘Flood’ (2015) is the piece I exhibited at my university degree show. It’s the sort of work I want to be making again but just don’t have the time or space for that kind of scale. I have this reoccurring dream every couple of months that I’m recreating the tide-mark onto the walls of one of the spaces with the huge windows overlooking the sea at the Turner Contemporary in Margate. Pipe dreams!

The Historic Dockyards genuinely flooded in 1954, andone of the submarines is still deposited in the silt of the river after the breaches broke and it got swept out. Whilst studying in my final year I had been working on a group project with four of my peers called ‘Wetlands’, curating community-engaged workshops and events culminating with an open- call outdoor exhibition, and an elevated period of my time was spent around Hoo and the river Medway. I was digesting so much reading material at that time, alongside personal stories from people that had lived in the locale for generations and watched the landscape around them flux and change. I became especially consumed with J. G. Ballard’s 1962 science fiction novel ‘The Drowned World’, his imagined dystopian aftermath of global warming (a world in which London is submerged under the water of the melted polar ice caps and human civilisation regresses back to a prehistoric state), and this all served to inform my work.

Both the factual and the fictive structure the lexicon of ‘Flood’. The installation itself simulates a juncture in the present that reports of the past; physical evidence of a pseudo phenomena – a flood of my exhibiting space, and the consequential aftermath in the wake of the water receding after a prolonged period of time. Synthetic and organic material are interspersed, stitched and layered, visually realising the sediment left behind following a purely invented freak disaster of my own creation.

​My campus sat on Chatham Historic Dockyard and for our degree show we turned the engineering shed our studios were based into a gallery space. By chance, my given exhibiting ‘plot’ was actually one of the studio wash stations, and the window overlooked the marina where the HMS Cavalier and HMS Gannet are still docked.

Why do you create?It’s instinctive. My dad is a builder and my Grandad was a carpenter and both extremely skilled craftsmen in their trades. Of evenings, my Grandad would always be working on small artistic projects, and my early childhood was spent being taught how to craft and woodwork, or at the kitchen table learning how to paint with oils. The smell of white spirit still takes me right back! I guess it feels natural for me to be using my hands, making, and I think that I was always encouraged to make. When I got older, that translated into a way of communicating what I couldn’t verbalise. I guess I create because it feels like an exorcism of sorts. I keep multiple journals and I’m forever scribbling on the back of receipts. If anything, the notes in my iPhone have begun to act as a sort of fragmented and incomplete train of thought. I should really do something with them…

What and/or who are you influenced by?I have a really great bunch of diverse minds &amp; beings around me who I feel very fortunate to call friends and peers. People are incredibly multi-faceted, the human condition is fascinating isn’t it? I’ve followed Marie Jacotey-Voyatzis’ work since she exhibited as part of the New Contemporaries at the ICA in 2014. I guess sometimes you are immediately connected with a visual language, and I enjoy her brazen humour. I saw Tracey Emin’s major survey ‘Love Is What You Want’ (2011) at the Hayward Gallery when I was still in secondary school, and I remember being equally impressed and bewildered that she was SAYING these things. Exposing what felt like her most intimate privacies in a public setting, laid out in it’s raw truth.

What challenges have you set for yourself?I’m mildly disillusioned with creating right now and I think it’s because I feel like I’m just ‘filling space’, and it doesn’t feel tangible or honest. There are things that I feel need to be said, and I can’t quite find a way to communicate that in form. So I guess I’m challenging myself to be truthful to my practice. I don’t know. Stay hard on myself? Sleep more. Text back…

What are your future ambitions?Years ago my dad built a brick shed in our garden to work out of, and when I moved back in with my mum at the end of 2016 I pulled it apart and renovated it into a semi-functioning studio space. Dedicating time to using it is definitely a priority, I’d like to be able to just lock myself in there for a month and work on personal projects. Aside, I’ve toyed with the idea of setting up an online platform for cross collaboration across the arts for some time. I like connecting people. Myself and my best friend from university always clown about eventually having our own exhibition space and putting on events, but I think both of us are secretly more invested in this than we make known…